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I Have an “Expelled” Backpack

Courtesy my friend Matt (same Matt who wrote these excellent posts). I don’t know how he got it and, more importantly, I don’t know entirely what to do with it… other than laugh my head off every time I look at it.

Part of me starts thinking along the lines of PZ Myers & the Great Cracker Incident. The other half thinks I should use it as a disguise and infiltrate creationist events (Ken Ham speeches along NJ Transit, say), and ask pointed questions when it comes to that. The last half is too sleepy to come up with a good idea. What say you?

Tax Cuts … Spending Hikes … and … Kleenex

I have a cold, no doubt contracted from the germ and viral factory that is air travel. The good news for you is that as I am feeling cranky and puny, I am in no mood to bombard you with pontification on my latest worry: The threat of an impotent stimulus package.

Nonetheless, knowledge is power, so I direct you to the following pieces …

Paul Krugman’s NYT column on Monday talks about Obama’s potential problem with conceptualization. He recommends moving away from terms like “jump start” and from thinking in the short-term (i.e., two years, which, of course, takes us to mid-term elections during a first-term presidency, so good luck on that suggestion). Krugman is still advocating for increased spending and for dropping business tax cuts. Sounds good to me.

Nate Silver — projections guru of baseball and 538 fame — is also in favor of increased spending. Go ahead and have tax cuts, but not at the expense of large stimulus in the form of government spending. He is currently in a blog debate (or whatever it’s called) with Gregory Mankiw, a conservative economist whose recent op-ed in the NYT spawned their “discussion” regarding relative economic growth from a unit of spending vs. a unit of tax cuts. Frankly, regardless that his politics are in line with mine, I am inclined to side with Silver’s analysis. He has an amazingly high accuracy rate when it comes to projections … baseball-player or voter performance. Granted economists’ projections have a dismal success rate, but Silver still raises interesting points (in temporal order) here, here, and here.

Salon is running a weeklong series from a variety of contributors on how to fix our economy. Monday: ideas to stimulate recovery and growth in urban and rural, low-income (and long neglected) areas. Tuesday: ideas that think big and empower the states with block grants. Across both installments is the primacy of smart environmental investment in any stimulus spending. Wednesday‘s piece explicitly talks about the role of the environment in economic recovery; though I don’t like the last contributor’s disingenuous characterization of Keynes’ theory about deficit spending. Yes, we have been running deficits for eight years and we are still in a recession. What’s important to consider is WHAT the deficit spending is buying.

Today is my birthday, perhaps an additional reason for my surliness (since I am now one of those non-descript, prime-number ages nowhere near the 20s) and certainly a contributing factor to my penchant for constant assessment and reassessment of our current surreal situation. I see micro changes in how my family is behaving financially, yet there remains (mostly) continuity in our standard of living. I see the macro changes that are frightening and the public discourse that is promising. Discomfiture and reassurance. And still there is my damn cold.

Illinois “Family” Institute: Gay Ministers “Dangerous”

Often, it’s hard to trace the line between principled concerns on the expansion of gay rights, and outright homophobia. Last year, we noted that intelligent conservative commentators like our friend Mike of The Big Stick manage to responsibly address gay rights from a conservative viewpoint by taking issue not with the morality of homosexuality, but instead objectively and non-judgmentally addressing desirability of departing from traditional social norms. I obviously disagree with Mike on this question, but I cannot call him or his fellow travelers “homophobes” merely for preferring tradition and history to an uncertain future.

If only more of the conservative movement were like him. Per Illinois “Family” Institute:

If ever there were a divisive character in American church life, V. Gene Robinson is one. His open and unrepentant engagement in homosexual conduct and his public defense of homosexuality in defiance of Scripture render Robinson not merely divisive, but dangerous. Our next president, the unifier, has invited a heretic to deliver the invocation at the Lincoln Memorial.

Yes, V. Gene Robinson – who will deliver an invocation during Obama’s inauguration – is gay. But he’s also an ordained bishop of the Episcopal Church, and could be considered “dangerous” to the extent that he challenges a church’s settled dogma or, by his mere existence, somehow psychologically wounds anti-gay activists. In a pluralistic civil democracy, neither is an appropriate line of public discourse: while we are entitled to our opinions, inciting hatred against our enemies by styling them “dangerous” for nothing but their beliefs or private deeds crosses a line. The Illinois “Family” Institute would have America style herself a theocracy to sustain its complaints.

Venture further into the IFI’s site at your peril: it’s a veritable petri culture of the crazier side of Christian fundamentalism, from articles purporting to prove that your blood is made of tiny Jesuses because a critical blood molecule looks kind of like a cross (remember that lunacy?), to climate change denialism. How either refusing to take ownership of our ecological future or flinging accusations at men of the cloth relate to defending the family, of course, remains beyond me.